Salade aux Lardons with baked Camembert

One of our favourite salads is "Salade aux Lardons" - green salad (usually endive and/or lettuce) with lardons (bacon pieces, cubetti di pancetta or equivalent). We had this on Friday, largely because I had harvested a nice endive from the garden:

We love the blanched heart of the endive best. It is very sweet compared with the outer green leaves. It also has the right texture to stand up to the hot dressing that goes with this salad. Most lettuces are too soft for a hot dressing, but the hearts of Cos / Romaine are good.



This is how you make the salad:

Wash your endive and/or lettuce and spin it dry (or dry it with kitchen towels), and arrange it in your bowls:

As you can see in the photo above, we added some croutons - small cubes of bread drizzled with olive oil and cooked in the oven until brown and crispy. They add a really nice crunchy texture to a salad. You can make variations on the theme by using flavoured oils (Hazelnut, Basil, Chilli etc) and by sprinkling the croutons with herbs.

Meanwhile, fry your lardons until they start to brown at the edges and the fat runs out of them.

Then add to the pan a generous splash of red wine vinegar, stir it in, spoon the lardons into the bowls of salad and pour the "juice" over the top.

This type of salad is best eaten immediately, before it cools down, so my photos of the finished item are a bit rushed and not of particularly good quality! This is the best I can do:

Here you see the salad being eaten with baked Camembert cheese and home-made bread. TV Dinners don't get better than his!

Here's a close-up of the Camembert before baking. A cross has been cut in the top, into which has been inserted a sprig of fresh Thyme, and the whole thing is drizzled with Sweet Freedom (substituting for Honey, because Jane is diabetic).



And the end result, after baking? A soft, gooey, spoonable, decandently unctious bowl of loveliness!



Bon appetit!

Too soon for Spring Cleaning?

Yesterday I had a day off work and since for at least part of the day it didn't rain, I used the opportunity to tidy the garden a bit. With all the bad weather recently I have had precious little time in the garden. Even yesterday it was only dry and sunny for about 3 or 4 hours, and my gardening stint was cut short by the return of rain. The garden was full of twigs and soggy wet leaves, so my first task was to remove as many as possible of these.

As I gradually removed the carpet of leaves, I found lots of bulbs coming up through the soil. Having been starved of light, they were all blanched a pale yellow colour, like these Tulips:

Wherever I found a clump of bulbs I pushed in a couple of sticks - firstly to mark them for future reference, and secondly to dissuade the local cats from digging them up. When the bulbs get bigger I will remove the sticks.



I tidied-up the area round the micro-pond too. I see lots of Red-veined Sorrel putting up new growth here, and a few Hardy Geraniums, so hopefully the harsh lines of the plastic pond will soon be "softened" once more.

Next to attract my attention was the little patch of Ferns, which was looking very ragged, so I have given it the "Short back and sides" treatment:

I particularly wanted to clear this area because very soon the Snakeshead Fritillaries will start to come up. Last year, after they had flowered I scattered the seeds from them very comprehensively over this little patch. The idea is that they have their turn in the limelight before the ferns put up new growth which will conceal them. The Fritillaries are quite delicate flowers and I don't want them to be over-shadowed. There are loads of purple Callicarpa berries on the ground here too. I expect now that my trimming of the ferns has revealed them, the Blackbirds will soon eat them.



I have also tidied up the Strawberry plants, which I have got in containers for want of space elsewhere. I removed all the debris (large numbers of pine-needles, for instance) and trimmed off all but a few of the youngest leaves.

 The potted flowers got the treatment too. Last year I bought several flowering perennials and planted them in big pots, like this Rudbeckia. This plant has grown a lot in the past year, and I think if I wanted to I could probably already divide it into two, but I will leave it another year before I do so.

This Aquilegia just starting to produce new leaves is one grown last year from seeds kindly sent to me by my blogging friend David Ford. Since neither of us knew the official name of the variety, I named it after David. I'm hopeful that it will flower this year.



Well, my garden is looking a fair bit tidier now, but quite bare. I'm resisting the temptation to sow or plant anything though, since it's far too early. The temperatures have been much higher than normal for this time of the year, but it is distinctly possible that we will get some very cold weather in the next few weeks.

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BTW, have you noticed that Blogger's "Search this site" facility is working again? Hooray! Why did it take them so long to fix it, I wonder...?

A Parsley question

I have some Flat-Leaf Parsley plants in the veg-patch. During the Summer they grew big and produced some massive leaves, many of which ended up in the kitchen:

Then the leaves went yellow and died back. I removed most of them, and they went into the compost-bin. But now a new flush of leaves has come through. They look very different to the ones from last Summer. They are on shorter stems and the leafy bits themselves are smaller:

My question is this - Is this normal? Actually, I have several questions: Will the plants produce any more useable leaves now, or will they just die back? As far as I know, Parsley is a biennial and presumably the plants have run their course now and will only produce flower-stalks. Should I therefore pull them up, or is it worth waiting a while? 

What do you think?

"Matsuri"

"Matsuri" is a Japanese word meaning "holiday" or "festival". It is also the name of a variety of Broccoli. I have today celebrated a (very small) Broccoli Festival by harvesting this:

"Matsuri" is marketed as a miniature variety, suitable for small gardens. I bought a pack of seeds for it back in 2011 and have grown a few plants from it each year since then - no problems with germination. I have used the plants as fillers for the odd spaces that appear in the raised beds every now and then, and it is eminently suitable for this purpose since it doesn't take up a lot of room.

I have found that it grows pretty slowly. This year's batch was sown on 24 June and transplanted into its growing positions on 28 July. In this next photo the Matsuri is the little plant in the angle of the raised bed, dwarfed by the big Brussels sprout plant to its right:



So it took six and a half months from seed to harvest! Patience is indeed a necessary virtue for the gardener. In defence of this plant I have to say that I think it is really supposed to be sown in early Spring in order to mature in Summer, so expecting it to mature during Autumn / Winter was probably asking a bit too much. My first one was harvested on 23rd November:

Then this one now:

There are still four more of these plants growing in my garden, but none of them is looking as if it will mature any time soon (if at all). I think in 2014 I will give this one a miss, and grow more of the "Tenderstem" type of broccoli, which grows much more rapidly.

Mesclun - part 2

The other day (18th December, to be exact) I sowed some seeds for the salad mix called Mesclun, and put them in my "Growlight House" to bring them on rapidly. They germinated in about 48 hours:

With the warmth and light provided by the Growlights, the seedlings have indeed grown quickly, and are now approaching the "Baby Leaf" stage, at which I will be able to start cropping them:



You can clearly see the different types of seedling in the mix now, including endives, chervil, rocket and (the best-looking one) a red-stemmed chicory of some sort:



Alongside the Mesclun have been three "Little Gem" lettuce, which had been reluctant to grow.



Now look at them:

I'm not sure what to do with these lettuces. They will probably end up being part of the "Baby Leaf Salad" along with the Mesclun. If I were to plant them outside I suspect they would just revert to sulk mode and do nothing.

Peashoot progress

A few days before Christmas, I sowed some peas in a couple of little plastic containers to produce some peashoots for use as a salad ingredient:

Well some time has passed, and the peas have grown:

Whilst at first sight impressive, these are actually no good for peashoots. I used an inappropriate variety of pea, and they have produced big strong tendrils, but almost none of the succulent leafy shoots I was looking for:

The peas I used were from a pack of "Marrowfat" peas bought in a supermarket. Marrowfat peas are simply ones that have been left to mature on the vine, in the pod, and then dried for long-term storage rather than eaten young and green. When you buy peas like this in a supermarket they are intended as a soup ingredient, not for planting! The supermarket is not going to tell the customer what variety the peas are, because 99.9% of their customers are not interested in this. The peas in my pack were evidently a semi-leafless variety.

Anyway, I decided to make the best of a bad job, and have planted the peas in a couple of big pots filled with compost, and have put them outside, protected by one of my plastic mini-greenhouses, so I might actually get a very early harvest of pea-pods.  Here you can (just) see them, inside a wind-swept, rain-lashed greenhouse heavily weighted-down with bricks to stop it being blown away:



The greenhouse in question sits on the sheltered side of our house, literally right outside a sliding door that opens out from our Living-room into the garden, and I can see it from where I sit.

I think the rest of that packet of peas might have to be relegated to the kitchen...

Harvest Monday - 6th January 2014

A harvest! I have a harvest!. This is it:

As you can see, it's a decent 2-person serving of Cavolo Nero. I have been quite keen to pick this for some time now, because the plants are beginning to produce flower-heads, so their energy will no longer go into producing leaves. As it happens, the leaves I have harvested this time are perhaps the best ones of all because they are quite small (6 - 8 inches in length) and the tough white midribs are not very big. We may even be able to get away without stripping the green parts off the ribs.

The kale looks nicer when brought into the kitchen. It is too gloomy outside at present to get decent pictures.



This Cavolo Nero will be made into a variation of one of our favourites kale dishes (which I have written about several times previously!) - pasta in a creamy, garlicky sauce, with the kale stirred in right at the end. On this occasion the dish will be enhanced by the addition of some smoked bacon lardons that Jane brought back from France. The type we like are called "allumettes" (matches) because they are cut very finely:

I had to look up what the word "hetre" means (as in "Fumage traditionelle, au bois de hetre"). It means Beech - in other words the wood used for smoking these lardons is Beech-wood. Yes, I know you can buy smoked lardons in British supermarkets, but somehow I think they are not quite as good as these Herta ones from France...

My only other harvest this past week was one very small head of Radicchio. Radicchio is very tightly-packed and something that looks small from the outside can actually provide a decent amount of leaves:

Here we see it served as an accompaniment to cold chicken-breast, "Bubble and Squeak" and home-made tomato ketchup. Delicious!